Gavin Newsom draws line on SF street behavior: City now ‘too permissive’

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Former Mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom says San Francisco has become “too permissive” when it comes to open drug use and other bad behavior on the city’s streets.

“People shooting up on the streets and sidewalks, where kids are in strollers, is not acceptable — it’s just not,” Newsom said during a visit to The Chronicle’s editorial board last week.

Newsom, who served as mayor for seven years before being elected lieutenant governor in 2011, has been attacked by GOP opponent John Cox for his leadership in San Francisco, a city that has drawn attention for homelessness, feces littering the streets and blatant drug use.

Newsom says there is plenty of blame to go around but that his “enough is enough” view came from spending time on the streets with one of the San Francisco homeless outreach teams that deals with opioid users and others on a daily basis.

Newsom said he was particularly struck by the comments of two Homeless Outreach Team members who are former drug users.

“The points they made are that the city is too lenient, too complicit as it relates to drug use out on the streets, and unless that changes they don’t think injection sites alone will, quote-unquote, solve the issue,” Newsom said, referring to Mayor London Breed’s push to create medically monitored centers for drug users to shoot up.

While Newsom said he is “very, very open” to the idea of safe injection centers, he questions their effectiveness.

The feeling among addicts, he said, is, “I’m going to shoot up when I need to shoot up because I’m self-medicating ... and I’m not going to wait for the doors to open in a facility that I have to make my way to — particularly in a city that frankly is indulging my use because they are not necessarily intervening.”

Newsom is seen as one of the nation’s leading progressives, in large part for having opened the doors to same-sex marriage when he was mayor.

But as a San Francisco supervisor, Newsom was best known for his “Care Not Cash” initiative, which offered the homeless care and supportive housing instead of direct cash aid from the state’s general assistance.

The program was roundly criticized by both homeless advocates and fellow Democrats.

Newsom said he isn’t ready to specify what programs or tough-love measures he would advocate to remedy the addiction and other problems on the streets, but he did tell the editorial board that his own views have been “hardened by the reality” of having served as mayor.

“When you are accountable to a quality of life, and accountable to diverse communities, you cannot allow the streets to be taken over,” he said. “And so I supported sit/lie ordinances, I supported panhandling restrictions, and I took the hits for that.”

On the other hand, Newsom was an early supporter of Proposition 47, the statewide measure approved by voters in 2014 that reduced penalties for many drug and theft offenses. Critics argue it has fueled an uptick in car break-ins and other street crimes.

Newsom told us that while he doesn’t support felony prosecution for most drug offenses, he does support enforcing the law when it comes to quality-of-life crimes such as public drunkenness or defecating on the streets.

“It’s a balancing act,” Newsom said. “It’s not about driving criminalization or abusing the right to use those laws as leverage, but oftentimes with drugs you’ve got to intervene, and there has got to be the ability to intervene.

“You can be too permissive, and I happen to think we have crossed that threshold in this state — and not just in this city,” Newsom said. “You see it. It’s just disgraceful.”

As for the reaction?

“Mayor Breed appreciates Lt. Gov. Newsom’s support for safe injection sites and his perspectives on the challenges facing our city and its streets,” said mayoral spokesman Jeff Cretan.

State of the estate: San Francisco socialite Summer Tompkins Walker, the daughter of North Face and Esprit co-founder Douglas Tompkins, has lost another bruising round in her battle to claim a portion of her late father’s inheritance.

The state Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles rejected her bid to overturn a probate court decision upholding her father’s right to hand over his entire estate to his second wife, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, and to the foundations that the couple created to preserve millions of acres of open space in Chile and Argentina.

Douglas Tompkins, an outdoorsman, businessman and philanthropist, died in a kayaking accident in December 2015.

Tompkins Walker is the 51-year-old daughter of Susie Tompkins Buell, who is one of Hillary Clinton’s best friends and, with Douglas Tompkins, co-founded the Esprit clothing line. The couple divorced in 1988.

Tompkins Walker has argued that Chilean laws, which forbid the disinheritance of children, should govern the estate — rather than the laws of California.

A three-member panel of the court disagreed, writing: “We are hard-pressed to imagine a reason that, as a matter of public policy, Chile would be concerned about Summer’s inheritance or lack thereof, as she is neither a citizen or a resident of Chile.”

Neither Tompkins Walker nor her attorneys responded to requests for comment. But as she told us soon after filing her case, her father’s decision to cut his children out of his will was “definitely an insult.”

“He clearly had no trust of us and no respect,” she said.

Adam Streisand, an attorney for the Douglas R. Tompkins Trust, called the ruling “a good day” for the late conservationist’s “extraordinary” preservation gift — adding that the court had “powerfully rebuked” Tompkins Walker’s attempt “to satisfy her greed.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX-TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call 415- 777-8815, or email matierandross@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @matierandross